Over the past few years people have loved to demonize Spongebob for shortening attention spans in school age children. New research from Microsoft shifts the blame of the decreased attention span from television to use of smart phones. However, it's actually not even that bad. Kids may have a decreased attention span, but have evolved into multitasking badasses.
But back to Spongebob. Everyone was quick to blame this diminishing attention span on a goofy sponge that lives in a pineapple under the sea. Research trying to prove that Spongebob is detrimental to kids attention spans is flawed and largely skewed in a limited pool of 60 kids. In the study, a select group of four year old children were exposed to nine minutes of Spongebob. After the brief period, the baby preschoolers displayed inattentive behaviors. What if they're really just pissed that you turned off a show in the middle and are trying to figure out if Plankton gets away with taking over the world or not! Generalizing all children in terms of such a narrowly biased group as becoming stupid from the show is just stupid. Plus, if you want to torture preschool kids with the same experiment using a different cartoon, you will get the same results. It's not Spongebob's fault.
